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Dream Hacking: How To Use Your Brain's Wildest And Weirdest State

Dream Hacking: How To Use Your Brain's Wildest And Weirdest State

It’s the last talk of the night at the Women’s Visionary Congress, a very Bay Area kind of conference. Amidst the yogic cushions and tea tables, volunteers are distributing little plastic baggies, each containing a gram of green leaves with a strong soporific effect. It was not California’s most famous recently legalized substance, but calea zacatechichi, an ancient and federally legal Mexican plant also known as “dream herb.”

Attendees who wish to indulge are asked to go home, brew the herb into tea — one with a taste so metallic and bitter, a plastic bear full of honey will not cut it. We will force it down, bed down for a wild night of weird dreams, and report back in the morning.

The good news for those who do not like to sup bitter tea, however, is that there is a completely substance-free way to unlock the psychedelic potential of our sleeping brains. It’s a practice used by some of history’s greatest inventors and artists to unlock their creativity. The final speaker of the evening, Jennifer Dumpert, describes herself as a "dream hacker" and dubs the drug-free experience "liminal dreaming."

Liminal dreaming is different from lucid dreaming, which means becoming aware during sleep so you can direct your brain to perform its stories however you’d like. Lucid dreaming can take an age to master, even if you chug dream herb tea every night. But liminal dreaming is simply about the moments when you drift out of and back into consciousness; it's about trying to prolong that wild brain state as much as possible. And that is something you could try right now, just by taking a nap.

Dumpert is the founder of the Oneironauticum, a decade-old international dream research group. Oneironauticum members all take the same vivid dream-promoting substance on the same night and compare notes; tonight, it's calea. But Liminal Dreaming, the book Dumpert just published on the term she coined, is the culmination of her life's work. It captures a fundamentally mysterious state of mind that science has barely begun to explore. Fellow author Douglas Rushkoff enthuses that it is "more accessible, sustainable and transformational than any drug or virtual reality."

Indeed, Dumpert — who stands before the crowd in a black jumpsuit and flowing white hair, and speaks in the booming tones of a former New Yorker — is not shy about the psychoactive drug comparisons. “It's not unlike an LSD or THC kind of experience,” says Dumpert. “Liminal dreams offer a natural way to go into the stranger realms of the mind, not to mention it's completely legal, short-acting, and hangover-free.”

Having taken the trip many times at her instigation, I can confirm: She's not wrong.

“Liminal” means you're in a kind of border zone. “Liminal dreaming” is less of a mouthful than the two scientific terms for the two brain states on either edge of sleep, both unfortunately coined by those florid linguists of the 19th century. There’s hypnagogia (which literally means going towards Hypnos, Greek god of sleep). And there’s its early-morning mirror state, hypnopompia (going away from Hypnos — think of those delicious stolen moments after you hit the snooze button, kind of awake and aware, kind of still living in dreamland.)

Scientifically, we’re still in the early years of a golden age of sleep. There’s so much we don’t know about our brains during six to eight hours a day. Dreams we understand least of all. We’ve known about the existence of REM sleep since 1953, when scientists first discovered that we move our eyes rapidly during certain portions of the night. But for decades, we thought dreaming only happens in REM sleep.

It wasn’t until 2016 that a study confirmed the existence of dreams in other sleep states. (Turns out the only kind of dream that happens in REM sleep is the kind where your body is completely paralyzed, which explains sleep paralysis: It’s the brain waking up in the wrong phase of sleep, without coming up through hypnopompia first.)

Lucid dreaming, meanwhile, also eluded science until relatively recently. It was first described by Aristotle in the 4th Century BC — but sleep science couldn’t prove its existence until Stanford University researcher Stephen LaBerge performed a groundbreaking study in 1985: He got lucid dreamers to count to 10 with eye movements while still asleep. LaBerge’s bestselling books kickstarted a lucid dreaming mania that has not abated yet. One lucid dreaming podcaster describes it as the equivalent of wearing a “full-body Virtual Reality suit.”

Now here comes liminal dreaming, which is to lucid dreaming as a casual mobile game is to full-body VR. It may not last as long or be quite as involved, but it’s easier to find and accessible to all.

Plus it has a hell of a historical track record. Legendary inventor Thomas Edison and legendary artist Salvador Dali independently arrived at their own methods of getting their creative best out of hypnagogia. They’d both sit in an armchair holding a heavy object (steel balls for Edison, a key for Dali) and allow themselves to nod off — but not all the way into REM sleep. When their hands went limp, the objects would clatter to the floor, waking them up. Edison would grab a notebook, Dali would grab a sketchbook, and furious recording of their imaginings would commence.

We have liminal dreams to thank for "Frankenstein," the lightbulb, and Star Wars.

They are far from alone in being ambassadors of the hypnagogic. Mary Shelley wrote that she got the idea for a story about an artificial man in a “waking dream” immediately after she "placed [her] head on the pillow" but "did not sleep." The late Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who visualized scripts for George Lucas, would regularly drift off in an armchair before he started painting, waiting for images to float up to his consciousness “like bubbles in champagne.”

In other words, we have liminal dreams to thank for Frankenstein, the lightbulb, The Persistence of Memory — and the look and feel of Star Wars.

Here too, science is playing catch-up. Since hypnagogia doesn’t last for long — most people are in it for about five minutes before slipping into regular sleep, unless you’re a narcoleptic, in which case you proceed directly to REM — there hasn’t been much in the way of study. We do know that it looks really weird when you see it on an EEG monitor.

All other kinds of brain states, whether waking or sleeping, settle down eventually so that they look like a steady wave. The liminal state, however, jumps around like static. This is why, when using a meditation wearable like the Muse that gives you audio feedback from your brain, it’s hard to accidentally slip into snoozing. On the boundary of sleep, the brain gets very active, and hence very noisy.

Our bodies also get twitchy in hypnagogia. Your arms or legs might lash out suddenly, or you might wake up with a sensation that you’re falling — the infamous myoclonic jerk. We don’t know why that happens either, although the leading theory is that it’s a reflex from our ancestors, primates sleeping in trees who needed to grab branches if they fell.

A boilerplate legal disclaimer would have to mention that people also experience “hypnagogic hallucinations,” especially auditory ones. It’s common to hear telephones that aren't ringing or voices that aren’t speaking. You might sense the shape of a stranger nearby, or something rushing towards you, which can be terrifying.

Again, we don’t know why.

“It’s almost an embarrassment, that for so many years, so little attention has been placed upon an activity that we spend a third of our lives doing,” says Dr. Guy Leschziner, clinical lead at the Sleep Disorders Centre in Guy’s Hospital, London, one of the largest sleep units in Europe. He’s also the author of the new bestseller about sleep troubles, The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep. ”Until recently, we've had almost no fundamental understanding of what sleep even is, or what it’s for … we’re in an area of exponential growth of knowledge.”

It’s possible, Leschziner says, that hypnagogia is not one discrete sleep state but different parts of the brain being in different states at different times. But as if to illustrate his point, Leschziner himself has not studied hypnagogia beyond the associated disorders — those hallucinations — and was genuinely fascinated to learn about Dumpert’s positive approach.

“Well,” says the neurologist and sleep expert as we wrapped up our interview, “you’ve taught me a lot.”

THE CARTOON BRAIN

Ironically, though, I’d only just learned of liminal dreaming myself. I’d read about hypnagogia and hypnopompia once upon a time; they both merit a few pages in an excellent 2007 book on our everyday states of consciousness, The Head Trip. But I had not really connected them to my own experience until I heard Dumpert talking about cartoons at a music festival.

This was at Lightning in a Bottle, the same place where mushroom scientist Paul Stamets held the rapt attention of a packed house by discussing the latest research on psilocybin. Elsewhere in the TED-like lineup of talks, Dumpert was taking attendees at the Southern California festival through a guided exploration into liminal dreaming. We were instructed to lie down and close our eyes, to focus on various parts of our bodies and our breathing, to try to identify the nearest sound and the furthest sound.

It turns out a shady tent on a hot festival afternoon, with birdsong in nearby trees and the distant thumping of subwoofers, is an excellent place to induce hypnagogia.

Dumpert was at pains to point out that liminal dreaming isn’t like regular dreaming. There’s no narrative. There’s no “you.” In normal sleep, you might go on a business trip to Mars with high-school friends and long-dead relatives and think it perfectly normal, but you’re definitely present. Liminal dreaming is egoless. You might experience flashes of light and color. All kinds of random images will show up in your head, too fast to pin down. Some of them, Dumpert says, “might look like cartoons.”

Bingo. Donald Duck, I thought. As a child I’d had general anesthetic in the dentist’s chair, and the last thing I remembered before being knocked out was an image of the Disney character strolling happily down some country lane. Ever since then, when falling asleep, that same Donald Duck would often show up in my head for a second or two. He was the herald of a series of random kaleidoscopic images that moved faster and faster, as if someone was hand-cranking a zoetrope behind my eyelids.

Suddenly it all clicked. The audio hallucinations, the primary-color images that often stood in for something else (psychiatrists call it autosymbolic phenomena), the Dali-esque melting, the drowsy sense of being pleasantly drugged, both asleep and awake at the same time. You can hear what’s going on in the world but you’re less inclined to care. All this was liminal dreaming.

I recognized this address. I visited every night, in fact, and sometimes after heavy lunches.

It can be tough to avoid slipping from hypnagogia into REM sleep if your body needs it — and hey, whose doesn’t sometimes? But on this occasion, I found myself settled perfectly in the liminal zone for the remaining 20 minutes of Dumpert’s talk.

Trying it again after the event, I wasn’t always able to replicate that length of time in the hypnagogic state. My brain would push some unseen elevator button that sent me down into sleep or (more usually) back up into consciousness. But I found that with practice, I could stay here for longer than five minutes, skimming off the surface of sleep like a stone on a languid lake.

“People treat hypnagogia like it’s a way station,” Dumpert says. “But they’re wrong. It’s a destination in itself.”

Dumpert says she has trained herself to slip into this liminal space practically on command, and to stay there for an hour or more at a time. She has identified several different territories within it — roughly corresponding to 80 percent awake, 60 percent awake, 40 percent awake, and 20 percent awake. She has taught herself to liminal dream with a laptop in her hands, and is able to touch-type with her eyes closed — producing pages of surprisingly comprehensible prose while still in hypnagogia.

On other occasions she will simply narrate the experience as it happens, using one of several audio recorder apps that automatically start when they detect a voice. Here are some extracts from a typical recording, replicated at length in Dumpert's book:

The workman outside laughing creates a jagged line … little kids have made paper boats but they’re two-dimensional drawings and little stick figures get in them and sail on the jagged line that’s blue now … a car starts outside and the sound picks up all the water … there’s the idea of Tom Brokaw’s hair … and there’s a cartoon dog with Pinocchio, but the dog is jealous because he can do song and dance like Singin' in the Rain

The surreal multisensory mental parade continues, touching on Picasso’s cubism, pieces of fluff, Barbies, griddle cakes and the bitter taste of orange peel in the space of a few minutes.

What does it all mean? One of the great features of Dumpert’s work is that it is uniquely resistant to tedious dream interpretation. Despite maintaining a Twitter account that describes her dreams, she doesn’t ascribe meaning herself. Although of course she welcomes it in the manner of a true Californian: Hey man, whatever you want to believe.

Indeed, you’re certainly welcome to try, readers of a fortune-telling or Freudian persuasion. There are enough symbols in the quick flashes of the zoetrope that you can conjure any future you’d like to see out of them. And we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have some sexual imagery among the endless litany, so you can stitch together a sexual narrative to liminal dreams if you wish. Just be aware that you’re the one doing the storytelling.

There’s an honesty to simply listing liminal experiences without judgment that is rarely found in journals of regular, REM dreams. That includes mine. I have kept my own dream diary, on and off, since 1995. But, ever the reporter, I have repeatedly observed myself adding a layer of interpretation to the dream even as I was recording it. Ever the editor, I was pumping up the narrative juice of the story.

But Dumpert’s recordings are just straightforwardly surreal. On one level, they show liminal dreaming works as entertainment. It's as weirdly enjoyable as an Adult Swim short, our own private stream of TikTok memes, and it's certainly cheaper than Netflix. On another, it cracks the code of creativity. You don’t have to be Dali to find inspiration lurking in its zigs and zags.

And on a third level, it fulfills the endless human appetite for altering our consciousness, but in a very short, controlled space of time. You don’t have to be Timothy Leary to revel in the psychedelia of hypnagogia.

Liminal dreaming happens in all of us every day. It is a largely unnoticed but essential element of the human experience. In an anxious, fast-paced, sleep-deprived age especially, it’s high time we laid back and let our brains babble for as many of those restorative near-sleep minutes as possible. Because in addition to the above benefits, there is the benefit of meditation.

“I used to have a very serious Zen [meditation] practice,” Dumpert says. “Now I have this instead. It’s been my primary practice for years, and of course, writing the book put me deep into it.”

When I arranged to visit Dumpert in San Francisco some weeks after Lightning in a Bottle, she asked if we could do the interview in the afternoon, as she liked to spend the morning in hypnopompia — “the snooze button is the best way to induce it,” she enthuses — and recording the results. I was reminded of the classic Beatles song I’m Only Sleeping, John Lennon’s hymn to his own hypnopompic mornings: stay in bed, float upstream.

Her home, which she shares with her partner Erik Davis, author of a Silicon Valley classic on technology and mysticism called Techgnosis, is an apartment in one of those glorious Victorians on a hill near Haight-Ashbury. It’s stuffed with books and records and the accumulated tchotchkes of decades, but pride of place goes to the sleeping chair in a bright bay window, where once in a hypnagogic vision a worker’s laugh gave rise to Tom Brokaw’s hair.

A lot of Dumpert’s dreams and liminal impressions come back to a sense of place. She often returns in them to very particular locations such as her grandparents’ house in Buffalo where she grew up, another “crazy old Victorian,” and the tiny former maid’s apartment in Paris she rented in 1987, around her 22nd birthday.

The latter was the location, one dark winter night, of the dream that started her lifelong fascination. It was a dream about a toy store in Buffalo, and within the dream, Dumpert was able to remember all the other places in Buffalo she often dreamt about. “I began to map them,” she says. “Some places have dropped away, new areas have become familiar dream locations, but the phenomenon remains.” Pride of place on her website is taken by an interactive map of her neighborhood, an "urban dreamscape" where you can click on a dream and get a quick visual impression of what it looked like.

Locations, and the frequency with which they appear, are “a great way to understand and discuss dreams,” she says. (I have since begun to map mine, and it’s telling to see how many of my dreams still take place in my hometown’s unremarkable library.)

Her practice hasn’t just connected her to the places of her life, but also to a family member who was at the end of her life. Three years ago, her aunt and godmother Robin — a former itinerant hippy who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in India — lay dying in a hospice in Buffalo. Dumpert was one of her primary caregivers. “One day she was talking about being with Ziggy Stardust, and they were going to the movies, and all her neighbors were there with their dogs.”

Other family members heard delusional deathbed rambling and corrected her: “No, Robin, you’re hot with Ziggy Stardust.” Dumpert heard the familiar signature of hypnagogic dreams.

We know less about the end-of-life brain than we do the sleeping brain. It’s possible that hypnagogia is common in these last liminal moments, as we prepare to slip into that sleep our lives are rounded in. The administrator of the hospice, Dumpert says, pointed out that such rambling is often medicated, sending the patient into regular sleep, at families’ requests.

Dumpert hopes awareness of liminal dreaming will change that: “We’re robbing people of this last phase of their mental experience because it freaks out the family. Why not let them be with Ziggy Stardust?”

Back at the Women’s Visionary Congress the following morning, participants returned to report their calea zacatechichi dreams. There were a few story-worthy narratives; one sounded like a David Cronenberg horror movie, another was an empowering tale of a pursuer eluded. Many reported a common effect of calea dreams: They were able to read text, even with underlining and highlighting, something that is notoriously difficult to do in regular dreams (as fans of the Richard Linklater animated movie about dreams, Waking Life, already know).

As for myself, I couldn’t remember anything specific — just a vaguely pleasant sense of long, pleasurable, story-free images, almost like being in the liminal zone all night long. And something deeper: a sense that in so doing, many problems had been ironed out, and the solutions would present themselves over time.

A friend at the event had a similar report: “I would describe my dreams not as vivid or clearly memorable, but it felt like every moment I was asleep I was dreaming,” he says. It was “less confusing experiences than usual, more like my brain was trying to think things through while I was asleep.”

May we all be so lucky as to spend as much as possible of the strangest third of our lives in that same headspace — no dream herb required.

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